Mother tongues revisited

A project named Mother Tongue Twisters run by poet Mohini Gupta aims to create contemporary poetry for children in Indian languages

When poet and translator Mohini Gupta was at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK, in 2017 as a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow hosted by Literature Across Frontiers, she conducted a workshop with schoolchildren that inspired her to write more poetry for younger people in her mother tongue, Hindi. “There was a need to create more engaging contemporary poetry for children in Indian languages,” said Gupta. “I wanted to fill this gap.”

This idea gained muscle when she conducted another workshop with students of the Community Library Project in New Delhi, run by novelist Mridula Koshy and her husband, Michael Creighton.